The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum

The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum is one of Britain's finest regimental museums, housed within Peninsula Barracks in Winchester alongside several other distinguished military collections. The museum tells the story of the light infantry and rifle traditions in the British Army from 1741 to the formation of The Rifles in 2007, covering an extraordinarily rich history that includes some of the most celebrated actions in British military history.

The regiments commemorated here — the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, the King's Royal Rifle Corps (originally the 60th Rifles), and the Rifle Brigade — trace their origins to a revolutionary change in British military thinking in the eighteenth century. The development of the rifleman as an elite skirmisher and sharpshooter, operating with a degree of individual initiative that was radical for its time, changed the nature of warfare and created a fighting tradition that endures in the modern British Army.

The museum is perhaps most famous for its extraordinary diorama of the Battle of Waterloo, created in the 1970s and painstakingly maintained since. Over 22,000 individually hand-painted model soldiers and horses re-create the events of 18 June 1815 at a scale of 1:20, with terrain modelled to correspond to the historical topography of the battlefield. This remarkable creation is a unique artefact in its own right and a constant source of fascination for visitors of all ages.

Beyond Waterloo, the museum's collections span the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the Indian Mutiny, Crimea, the Boer War, both World Wars, Malaya, Borneo, Cyprus, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, and the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weapons, medals, uniforms, paintings, and personal objects bring each campaign period to life with depth and authenticity.

The museum also explores the distinctive culture of the rifle and light infantry regiments — the use of dark green rather than red coats, bugle calls instead of drums, and the ethos of self-reliance and marksmanship that set these regiments apart from the rest of the British Army.